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Category Archives: nations and nationalism

Maybe there were always two things under the rubric “nation” — the ethnic nation, and the bureaucratic nation — and the “rise of the nation state” was the rise of the idea that the two had to coincide.

Looking at it that way , there perhaps was never a reason for the two to conflict since they do different things. Ethnic nationalism
can be satisfied by ceremony and symbolism, bureaucratic nationalism by taxation and treaties.

Which gets us back to Scotland. Something that emerged from the campaign , to the point of being a cliche, is that the Yes campaign was based in the heart, and the No in the head, or, as we might like to put it, in System 1 versus system 2.